A look at six years...

By strange coincidence, I sold my first book--a now out of print comedy The Maid of Dishonor--a few weeks after I gave birth to my first child and it actually hit bookstore shelves a few weeks before I gave birth to my second child. (Publishing moves pretty slow, plus I had my kids pretty close together.)

Well, the baby of our family turns six this week. Whilst I was ruminating on this (in the form of where did six years go? I'm getting old! Or at the very least older and holy cow, at the rate the kids are growing, they'll both be taller than me before they finish elementary school!
My ruminating, btw, can be a bit spastic... )

Anyway, when I realized that the kiddo was six, I realized that I've also been a published author for six years, not counting that strange year plus limbo of having sold books but not yet having had any released. Parenting is a tricky business and you often wory that there are so many things you could/should be doing better; publishing is also a tricky business that can make a writer--no matter what level they've reached in their career--feel as if all progress has ground to a halt. So this week I've been taking a look back. What, as an author, have I accomplished in the past six years? What, as a mother-child team, have we accomplished in that same amount of time?

Little One can now tie shoes without parental assistance (and will in fact protest parental assistance so loudly that even the neighbors are aware of this milestone.) In fact, Little One has hit several more "can do it myself" achievements this year which would include showering without help if only I didn't require that all the shampoo actually be rinsed out. My kids feel that I'm very picky on this--apparently, they prefer to take the suds with them as some sort of headpiece souvenir.

I've sold to three different publishers a combination of novels, short stories and nonfiction.

I've received fan mail.

Little One wrote (and illustrated) an entire book called Pam-I-Am Likes Blue Eggs and Ham. The rhyming prose and pictures were delightful. We'll tackle the concept of plagiarism in the next six years...

I've not only had books published, they've been published in German, Korean, Czech, Polish, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek and a few others of which I am uncertain. I did find out that one of my milder romances--a novella in which I wrote absolutely no love scenes--was given the rather racy title "The Sins of His Youth". And I've noticed that some of my European cover art is a bit racier as well!

My Little One is blossming into a very independent thinker with distinct opinions and personality quirks. Which alternately adorable and gratifying--except when I'm being told I'm wrong and being treated as if I'm kind of stupid.

However, readers, librarians, aspiring writers and fellow publishing professionals take me seriously enough that I've not only been invited to present workshops and all-day seminars but, this past year, to be a featured welcome speaker at the conference that was my very first I'm-trying-to-learn-how-to-write convention ten years ago. So, in that respect, I've come a long away baby!

So has Little One. The child who seemed content to crawl and showed little interest in learning to walk now has four sports trophies. The bookshelf has always been full of kids' stories, but now a lot of them can be read without my assistance. We still have the nightlight, but we no longer have to leave the hall light on for half the night and it's been months since I woke up to a small, scared child asking to sleep in my room.

Some days, I probably seem frazzled to anyone who talks to me. I am underpaid, definitely overworked, and only about half sure at any given moment that I know what the hell I'm doing. But when I stop, take a deep breath and consider my life, I always reach the same conclusion: I have the two best jobs in the world.